Franglaise Mummy

Posts Tagged ‘induction’

Baby C is 5 months old today so I feel it’s time to finally share her birth story with the world. Warning: Long birth story containing too much information for those of a sensitive nature.

It took me less than an hour to give birth to C, according to my hospital notes, and it took us all a bit by surprise.

So let’s rewind a bit before I go into C’s birth story….My due date arrived and I turned up to the hospital with a baby tucked up in the warm still, I was examined, given a sweep and sent home. The midwife didn’t seem to think that the sweep would do much as I wasn’t looking overly ready to give birth.

That was the Friday morning. Friday came and went. Saturday came and went with no labour-like signs at all. Even the Braxton Hicks that I’d been having for about 4 weeks had disappeared. So Hubs and I decided that he would finally get to go and see Skyfall at the cinema on the Sunday with my brother (I’d been making them put it off for about 3 weeks as I kept thinking the baby was coming!), whilst L and I watched Madagascar 3 in another screen at the same cinema.

Just as we parted ways at the cinema I felt a very strange sensation, so popped to the toilet and discovered that what I thought had been a show in the last few days had been nothing, as this was a very clear show. I got to our screen and decided to text Hubs to warn him, but I knew if I texted “I’ve just had a show” he wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about, so I texted “I’ve just lost my mucous plug”. The reply I got back was hilarious “What? In the cinema? Can you find it?”!! I’m not sure he had any idea what I was talking about. Once he realised what it was he freaked out a bit, but I reassured him that I had no other signs, so he could sit back and enjoy the 3 hours of his film!

Nothing happened during the film fortunately, and that evening I suggested we have curry and red wine to see if that might encourage anything to keep going/get properly started. I enjoyed them but didn’t feel that they’d done anything when I went to bed.

Around 2am I woke up with a contraction, but because that had happened so many times before with Braxton Hicks, I was annoyed rather than excited. I dozed until around 4am when I couldn’t sleep anymore as I was getting painful but irregular contractions. So I did what any other expectant mother would do, and I tweeted it to see if it could be labour. You’ve got to love Twitter, within 5 minutes (at 4am!) I got several replies from mums saying they’d had irregular contractions right up to their babies being born.

Right, time to take things seriously. I opened up my contractions app (loving the new technology since L’s birth in 2006) and started tracking them. 30 minutes apart. 12 minutes apart. 23 minutes apart. As my mum and dad were going to drive over for the birth (90 minutes’ drive into London) I sent my mum a text at 6am, “Morning! I’m having irregular but painful contractions and I’m having to control my breathing through them, it’s your call if you come now or not as you know more about this stuff than me.” Mum is a nurse, a trained midwife and has had 5 kids, while I had had one baby which I was induced for, so didn’t have a clue what “real” labour was like.

In less than a minute Mum called me, waking Hubs and confusing him as he hadn’t realised anything was going on. Whilst talking to Mum I had to stop talking to breathe through a contraction, at which point she said “I think we’ll get dressed and come up soon.”

Hubs was convinced it was a false alarm, as I’d already had Mum and Dad up for Braxton Hicks once before. We lay in bed until around 7.30am, trying to figure out if these were real contractions or more Braxton Hicks, at which point I got Hubs to get L up and ready for school while I had a bath to see if that made them go away or not.

When I got out of the bath the contractions were stronger, longer and every 10 minutes or so. I went downstairs in my dressing gown to have some breakfast and ended up eating peanut butter on toast whilst holding on to the table and rocking my hips to ease the pain. L must think this is normal behaviour as she didn’t bat an eyelid!

Around quarter to nine my parents arrived, and my contractions suddenly jumped to every 2 minutes. Mum took one look at me and sent me upstairs to get dressed while Hubs took L to school. At 9.05am we were in Dad’s (new) car on our way through London’s Monday morning rush hour traffic, with me mooing in the back and Mum fanning me and passing me water; Hubs was in the front cracking jokes while Dad kept looking anxiously at me in the rear view mirror, I’m not sure if he was more worried about my waters breaking/giving birth in his car or about the pain his daughter was in.

We pulled up outside the hospital at 9.30am and it took us until 9.46am (my official check-in time) to make it up to the maternity department and to get checked in. All I remember is stopping and starting my contractions app and holding onto walls in the hospital, hip-rocking and mooing. At this stage my contractions were coming thick and fast every minute.

It took the midwife 15 minutes to do an initial check of me as she kept having to stop when I had contractions. All I could think was “this baby is coming very soon, I must be about 8cm by now”. Can you imagine my disappointment when she told me I was just 4cm and that it would probably take another 4 hours or so?!?

I had been saying I wanted to give birth in the midwife-led suite with no drugs etc, but when I heard I was only 4cm I turned to my mum and said “there’s no way I’m carrying on like this, I’m going to need an epidural”, or something to that effect, probably with a few swear words thrown in for good measure!

Mum looked at me knowingly, nodding her head and saying “let’s just see”. She had warned me beforehand that the women in our family tend to do very quick births with labour being jumped through, but I couldn’t really compute that at the time.

Some time after 10am I was escorted into a delivery suite, I vaguely remember a midwife introducing herself but I think I had my eyes closed most of the time. I had bought a comfy new outfit to labour in, had brought hairbands to keep my hair out of my eyes etc but that all went out of the window as everything was so fast and furious.

I was leaning on the edge of the bed as I couldn’t face lying down at all, and all I could do was bark instructions at Hubs and Mum: “Water!”, “Fan!”, “Sick bag!” The most I managed to get out was to yell at the midwife “Get off my back” as she kept putting her hand on my lower back which was where the pain was.

I really felt like I wanted to push but all I could think was “you don’t push at 4cm, you’re crazy”. Finally I said to the room at large, “I need to push!” and the midwife warned Hubs that as I wasn’t on the bed he’d need to be prepared to catch the baby as it came out. The thought that flashed through my mind was “he’ll never manage that, he’ll let the poor thing crash to the floor on its head”.

Around this time the midwife asked if my waters had broken yet, and it was only then that I realised they hadn’t, so she told me I could push, and lo and behold, there went my waters, all over the floor in the delivery suite – taking Hubs a bit by surprise (Mum and the midwife seemed unfazed by this).

The midwife then decided she wanted to examine me and got me up on the bed, on my knees as there was no way I was lying on my back. Then I was given the green light to do what I needed to do, so I pushed like I’d never pushed before.

I was convinced when I had L, that even though I’d had an epidural, that I’d felt the pain of labour as I could feel when to push with the contractions. I can safely say that was a big, fat lie. I had no paracetamol or anything for C’s birth, in fact the gas and air arrived just as I started pushing and I ended up breathing through my nose and just clamping down on the tube in my mouth. I certainly felt this baby coming into the world! And was she ever ready to get here!

In 5 minutes of pushing (L came after 12 minutes of pushing) she arrived on the bed, but as I was knelt up against the back of the bed I couldn’t see anything, and no one said anything. My baby was here, but was it a boy or a girl? I asked “What is it?” and finally Hubs announced “It’s a girl”. And that’s when the (happy) tears came.

She had come out with the cord wrapped around her neck and was distressed (medical speak for there being meconium in the waters) so they kept an eye on us, but she was healthy and I was fine (apart from the minor case of second degree tearing of course!), and L had the baby sister she had wanted for so long.

So all in all my official labour on my hospital notes is 59 minutes, and I went from 4cm to fully dilated in less than half an hour, with 4cm to delivery in just a mere 45 minutes. Not bad work by 10.45am on a Monday morning!

I’m not sure my English birth could have been more different to my French birth (which you can read about here), but the most important thing in both cases was the safe delivery of my beautiful baby girls

This post is dedicated to my cool, calm and collected Dad for getting me to the hospital without freaking out, to my amazing Mum for being my other midwife (I loved having you there this time, Mum), and most of all to Hubs for being there and still wanting to be with me after seeing me in that state!

It was so worth it.

20 minutes old – first breastfeed

Skin-on-skin with Papa

Feeling better after a shower, 4 hours later

First official photo, 6 hours old

Today I am 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant, and doing my utmost to get this baby out naturally. Which is funny really when you think that I was happy to go to 42 weeks with this pregnancy and was in no particular rush for the baby to get here. However that all changed a couple of weeks ago when I started itching crazily one night, and then my blood test results showed that there was an issue with some of the levels linked to my liver. I was in and out of the hospital 3-4 times a week, seeing midwives, having blood tests and abdomen scans to check my liver, kidneys, spleen and gall bladder.

Initially they diagnosed it as being Obstetric Cholestasis which affects 1 in 140 pregnant women every year in the UK, and there is a chance of your baby being still-born if it is not managed, which means in general having an induction by 38 weeks. If you think you might have OC there is a great video about it over on Honest Mum’s blog who suffered from it during her first pregnancy, and which I found really helpful as I was getting my head round it initially.

However, having told me at 37 weeks that I was likely to be induced by 38 weeks, my levels settled down, which made them think that it probably wasn’t OC. This was naturally a huge relief, but the problem now is they don’t know why my levels went haywire, so to avoid any unnecessary risks it looks like it’ll be induction time for me this Friday when I am 39 weeks….unless I can get this baby out naturally by then.

Now I had an induction when L was born (read her birth story here) and was so hoping to avoid medical intervention and inductions this time round, so my initial reaction was shock and disappointment. Then I realised that the main thing here was the safe arrival of this baby, however that might be.

The good news is that when I saw the consultant last Tuesday she told me that I’m actually looking quite promising for an early natural labour – at 37 weeks and 4 days I was already 1-2cm dilated and my cervix was soft and looked promising. She gave me a sweep and since then I’ve been having lots of contractions and lower back pain, which haven’t led to anything but which make me hope that natural could still be on the cards.

I’ve been reading up on natural ways to kick-start labour. Again. I went through all this with L last time and none of it led to anything, but then when they induced me with her I was nowhere near ready for a natural labour, so I’m hoping that this time I might just cheat the induction….

So what are natural ways to start labour?

• Sex seems to be the biggest suggestion from everyone, which is convenient as it’s so the easiest thing to be doing when you’re the size of a house!
• Slightly easier but not everyone’s cup of tea is another suggestion that you hear more in whispers than being shouted about, and that’s oral sex. Something to do with the prostoglandins in semen working faster/better if they go into the digestive system rather than onto the cervix. Hmmmm, maybe. Sounds a bit like male propaganda to me, but who knows?!
• Pineapple. Eating it. Lots of it. The only problem being you need to eat about 7 to get the desired effect. I ate one whole one when pregnant with L and burnt my mouth something chronic. Do you know how acidic a pineapple is?!?
• Raspberry leaf tea or the tablet version. I tried taking the maximum of this from weeks 38 to 42 with L and it never did anything for me, but others swear by it. I’d say the jury is still out on it.
• When I had an antenatal check-up with my GP he suggested (along with lots of sex with hubs) that I have a couple of glasses of wine, now that was the best suggestion I’ve heard in a while. But after 9 months of sobriety, the two glasses I had in Pizza Express to celebrate the start of half term on Friday made me happily merry, which is not a bad thing. Although I’m sure I looked like the worst kind of mum, with my big bump and my glass of wine!
• Hot curries. Hubs is delighted as normally I’m all about the korma so there’s no sharing to be done in this house when it’s takeaway time. That all changed last week and he’s loving watching me sweat my way through the hot curries he loves to order.
• Walking. In the last week I have done two brisk 3 mile walks, and all they’ve done is tire me out.
• I even tried the Wii Dance with L and realised we really should get some net curtains, as I’m sure that wasn’t a pretty sight for the neighbours and passers-by!

There are many other old wives’ tales which I won’t list here, but so far nothing seems to be working here. We get the contractions. We get the back pain. We get all excited, thinking this is it. And then, nothing.

So it’s back to see the consultant tomorrow, another sweep and no doubt a date in the diary for an induction sometime before Friday. Until then you might see me pounding the streets of London, in between swigging wine and getting jiggy with it with hubs!

Maybe my last pregnant photo – 38 weeks and 2 days

I am now 32 weeks pregnant and it has been such an interesting journey, comparing my pregnancy in France to my pregnancy here in the UK, so I thought I would share my comparisons of the two pregnancies.

Pregnancy N°1: The French One                                                        
When: March – December 2006
Where: St Vallier de Thiey, a village on the French Riviera, inland above Grasse and Cannes

1. Permanent nausea 24/7 for the first three months.
2. Permanent exhaustion 24/7 for the first three months.
3. No real cravings, except wanting red wine whenever I saw a glass.
4. Very low blood pressure (signed off work for this twice, in the first and last trimester.)
5. Anaemic for most of the pregnancy.
6. Stressful pregnancy, counting down each day.
7. Horrific cankles (what are cankles?) from about month 4 until the birth.
8. Weight gain of 13Kg (about 29lb) from start to finish, and a teeny tiny bump (this is me at nearly 42 weeks – excuse the highly unattractive photo!):
   

   The night before my induction with L

9. A baby that I thought moved quite a lot.
10. 45 minute commute door to door: driving from our home in the hills above Grasse to the office in the coastal town of Antibes.
11. No ante-natal visits with midwives, all done with my gynaecologist/obstetrician.
12. Virtually no ante-natal preparation/classes etc.
13. Monthly appointments with my gynaecologist/obstetrician, with full weigh-in, blood pressure check and examination “down below”.
14. Monthly blood tests in a separate lab for toxoplasmosis (more information about toxoplasmosis).
15. Test for diabetes despite not being at risk.
16. Scans offered at every monthly check-up if I wanted them, with 3 obligatory ones.
17. Strict instructions given from the gynaecologist/obstetrician on what to avoid eating and drinking: no alcohol, no smoking, no raw meats or fish, no cheese made from unpasteurised milk, no foie gras, no shellfish, all meat to be cooked all the way through, all fruit and veg to be washed thoroughly etc.
18. No mention of breast-feeding at all.
19. An induced and very quick labour with epidural (more about that here) with the end result being a healthy little girl:

Result: a baby girl weighing in at 2.7kg (5lb 15oz)

Pregnancy N°2: The English One                                                      
When: February – November 2012
Where: London

1. Very little nausea, and what I had was very easy to control.
2. More tired than usual, but again it was easy to control.
3. No real cravings, except wanting to eat lots of fresh fruit and having more of a sweet tooth than usual.
4. Normal blood pressure.
5. No problem with anaemia.
6. A mostly stress-free pregnancy (except for the usual stresses and strains of daily life), with no big rush to get through it. This one has certainly whizzed by a lot faster.
7. Cankles only making occasional appearances, when the UK weather is hot and when we were on holiday in sunny climes
8. Weight gain of 9kg (about 20lb) so far and a much bigger bump, here I am at just 30 weeks this time round:
   

   L kissing my 30 week tummy

9. A baby that doesn’t stop dancing. Ever. This is one active baby! I thought that L was a mover and shaker but this one beats her hands down.
10. 45 minute commute door to door: a 7 minute walk to the tube station, an 18 minute ride on the Northern Line where I usually get given a seat, then a 7 minute walk the other side.
11. All ante-natal visits carried out by different midwives at the local hospital where I will have this baby.
12. Refresher NCT classes start tomorrow and I’m also doing hypnobirthing this time round. I’ll have more to report on that later…
13. Fewer appointments than with L, I have been weighed once at the very start, my blood pressure is checked each time and to my amazement no one has ever examined me “down below”! This is the biggest shocker after pregnancy in France!!
14. No mention of toxoplasmosis at all, except when I asked about it I was told that if I didn’t work on a farm then I shouldn’t worry about it. They did however tell me to wear gloves for gardening and for cleaning cat litter and to wash all fruit and veg thoroughly.
15. No mention of a diabetes test.
16. 2 scans at 12 and 20 weeks, plus an additional scan planned for 36 weeks to check the size of the baby as L was so tiny.
17. A vague mention made of what to eat/avoid eating etc. Although during the first midwife appointment we did discuss alcohol and smoking.
18. Breast-feeding talked about and the advantages clearly explained during a recent midwife appointment, despite me stating that I’m a huge advocate and that I breastfed L for 1 year and exclusively for 6 months, and that I fully intended to do it again.
19. Hopefully a natural birth this time in a midwife-led suite in the local hospital, which I promise to report back on.

It is hard to say how much of the differences are because it is a second pregnancy, so the medical staff and B and I are more relaxed about the whole thing. Also for my pregnancy with L I had previously had a miscarriage so I’m sure that added a lot of stress as I wondered about my ability to carry a baby to term.

The biggest shocks for me are the fact that no one mentions anything about toxoplasmosis here, which is HUGE in France, both at check-ups/blood tests and when talking to other mums (I was always getting asked, “Tu as eu la toxo?” whenever discussing pregnancy with other women). The other thing that still amazes me is that no one has ever asked to look between my legs! Now I’m not a huge fan of a stranger poking and prodding about down there, but after that being such a regular occurrence at every single check-up for 9 months it France, it still astounds me that not one single person has looked down there yet! According to my UK mum friends this is common and you’ll only get looked at “down there” if you are overdue and need a sweep.

Fortunately I realised fairly quickly that no one was interested in what was going on in my knickers after my first check-up so I’ve stopped getting naked now for my appointments!

How did your pregnancies compare? Was it a boy/girl thing? A country comparison? An age comparison? I’d love to hear if you had any surprises with later pregnancies.

My positive pregnancy test result has taken me on a trip down memory lane, remembering my pregnancy with L in 2006 and her birth in the December. Just in case you didn’t know, French hubs, B, and I used to live in the south of France, we only moved to London when L was three and a half, so my pregnancy with her, her birth and her early years all took place on the French Riviera.

I remember reading English books and magazines about pregnancy, where they talked about discussing your birth plan with your midwife. Well, along with everyone in France that I knew I had an obstetrician, not a midwife. So I rocked up to one of my later antenatal appointments with my birth plan duly printed out to share with her. Thinking back to it now it does make me laugh. It read something like this:

1. I do not want to be induced.
2. I do not want a C-section.
3. I do not want an epidural.
4. I do not want an episiotomy.
5. I do not want to be put on a drip.
6. I want to be able to move round as much as possible and have a natural birth.
7. I want the baby to be put directly to my breast and not to be fed formula.
8. I want my husband to have the option to cut the cord. (At the time he was baulking at the idea of this, but ended up doing it and being delighted about it.)

My obstetrician gave it a cursory glance before adding it to my shamble of notes on her desk (she got to keep all the notes throughout the pregnancy). I consoled myself that this was because it would be brought out when I was actually in labour.

Now what actually happened when I gave birth is quite the opposite to what I requested, which is why my birth plan does make me chuckle now.

My due date was calculated by my obstetrician in this way: date of presumed ovulation + 9 calendar months = due date. So my due date was actually 41 weeks and 2 days after the first day of my last period. Even after my scans she didn’t change this, maybe this is the French way. Or her way.

Anyway, on my due date nothing was happening so I went in for a check-up. Nothing doing so I was told to come back the next day for a 9am induction (at 41 weeks and 3 days) as maybe the placenta was deteriorating and oh as it was Friday it would also avoid any emergencies cropping up over the weekend. Now I look back I wonder how much of it was to get it done during the working week and to avoid working at the weekend, and how much was because it had to be done. All I heard was “placenta deteriorating” and “you’ll have your baby tomorrow”.

So I turned up the next day at 9am, feeling a bit weird as I knew that, despite not a hint of labour, I would hold my baby in my arms that day. Now I have no experience of induction in England and none of my friends were induced in France, so I don’t know if this is normal or not, but this is how it went:

• Lie on a bed in sterile garb.
• Do not take any books, magazines or music into the delivery room as they are not sterile. By the way, don’t forget the camera so you can capture those first minutes of your baby’s life. What was that about only sterile things in the delivery room again??
• Have your heart hooked to a monitor.
• Have the baby’s heart hooked to a monitor.
• Have a drip set up.
• Feel completely normal with no signs of labour.
• Have oxytocin pushed into the drip.
• Immediately go into full-on labour, lying down with nothing to distract you.
• Carry on like this for three hours with contractions every 1 to 2 minutes, with nothing to take your mind off it, and oh yes, do not move from lying on your back on the bed.
• After numerous checks and being told I was only 3cm dilated, and that it wouldn’t go any further without my waters being broken, and them refusing point blank to break my waters without an epidural, I finally gave in to an epidural after 3 hours. (Gas and air do not exist in France – it’s either all au naturel or with an epidural.)
• The epidural kicks in incredibly quickly and I no longer feel the slightest contraction. B gets sent off to have lunch and call the future grandparents to update them. I have a nap.
• On waking up I feel like I want to push, they call B back in, it’s time to get this show on the road.
• The obstetrician comes rushing in, ready to give me an episiotomy (despite the birth plan and a tiny baby), unfortunately for her/fortunately for me it’s too late as mother nature has already made the necessary natural tear.
• After 12 minutes of pushing (apparently – the midwives there have competitions over whose mum is the fastest and I won that day) I am told “C’est une fille!” and the previous 5 hours are all forgotten.
• 2.7kg (5lb15oz) of bundle of joy is then placed on my breast as B cuts the cord.
• Numerous tears are shed (mostly me, L was pretty cool about it all).

So that was the birth bit, pretty far removed from my perfect birth plan but with hindsight there’s not a great deal I’d change. L was born safely and well.

The only hiccup was 9 hours after she was born, around 11pm, when B had gone home and I was pottering around my hospital room (shared with just one other mum) getting ready for bed, and I felt a gush of something. My sister had warned me that you can wet yourself soon after having a baby so I thought that was it, until I looked down. Yikes! Chain-saw massacre on my legs! Despite the brick in my attractive post-natal knickers my legs looked like Carrie on prom night!

I called the on-call midwife from the en-suite toilet (where I had rushed to) who told me, in a rather bored tone, that heavy bleeding is normal after giving birth. That told me! So I gave myself a pep talk, dragged myself off the toilet and back to my bed, where I collapsed with the room spinning. Having never fainted in my life I decided this probably wasn’t right, and decided to risk her wrath and call back again, insisting this time that she come and see for herself at least.

One press on my tummy and it was a different story. Rushed to surgery I was asked if I wanted to call my husband “to say goodbye, just in case”! I declined when they told me they needed to stem the bleeding asap. So abandoning my newborn just hours after having her, I found myself in an operating theatre, shivering from cold and blood loss and being told to stop trembling by an anaesthetist as he needed to put a needle in my spine to numb me from the waist down, and that if he missed I could be left paralysed. Ah the bedside manner!

After what felt like hours of lying with my legs akimbo, with people wandering in and out of the theatre, as my obstetrician tried to discern if anything was left “in there”, I was finally told “it’s probably all ok, we can’t find anything”. 2 hours of lying in a delivery room alone, away from my baby (and B) and listening to other women screaming through labour ensued until finally I was allowed back up to my room and my little girl.

It’s not the best birth story, but it’s also far from being the worst. Luckily I didn’t hear until after this that the primary cause of maternal death in France is through haemorrhaging!

As I think back to my birth story and prepare myself to do it all again, I’m not worried or upset or angry or scared, just excited that there will be a new life coming to join us in a few months. At least this time round I’ll be more prepared (hopefully).

It is all worth it when you get this at the end.

L on the day she was born